Very kindly, the goslings’ new guardian has sent me a photo and said they’re settling in fine, starting to explore their new home and mix with the other poultry there – runner ducks and chickens.

Hannibal and Lucy seem totally fine despite having their babies reft away suddenly, which is a relief. It’s possible I’m missing the gooselings more than they are!

So much for my plan to ask if I could ride Abe on the stubble fields – the combine was working on Monday and today the field’s ploughed!

I’m just home tonight after delivering the goslings to their new home in Perthshire – they’ve gone to be pets and lawn-mowers in an idyllic spot near Aberfeldy, miles off the road with lovely people. Hannibal and Lucy were very upset about it this morning but seem settled tonight.

Now, if I can find new homes for the ducklings as well, that will be fantastic! Especially as both Black Duck and Little Madam are broody again and have nests they’re busy sitting on….

Apart from this, all continues steadily. I’m working pretty much flat out between catching up on work here, writing new courses and lessons for students to do online and job-hunting – I like being self-employed but it’s going to take time to build my income back up there and in the meantime I need to pay bills now, so if I need to spend a while scrubbing floors to keep the critters fed, so be it.

I managed to get 6 white silkie bantam eggs last week and they’re all candling fertile, so hopefully in another couple of weeks I’ll have the last (definitely, the last!) batch of chicks this year and the incubator can go away for the winter. I’ll make sure it’s stored out of rat reach this time! Fingers crossed I get some hens when they hatch instead of more roos, but I intend to rear this batch with lots of handling and get them really tame so I can ask them to work with people next year without stress.

It’s 7 days today since my mother went into the nursing home, and I’ve spent the time cleaning, tidying, moving furniture and tying up loose ends.

Abe had such a nice time on his walk, he asked to go again – this time while I was sitting on him! I had just intended a quiet walk around the yard with him, but he carried me firmly to the gate and stood by it with an expectant air. I turned him away the first time and he walked down to the field gate, posed looking so smug his ears nearly crossed in the middle for the other horses to go green with envy, and then took me back to the road gate and asked to go through it again!

Getting through the gate did involve a lot of manoeuvring and valuable work on understanding each other’s signals as I attempted to explain to him how to stand next to the gate, allow me to lean down and open it, back a couple of steps so I could pull the gate open and then walk through the gap, turn around, walk into the gap, allow me to grasp the gate and then reverse while I pulled it shut, before stepped forwards again alongside the gate so I could flip the latch shut again! It took a while and a lot of discussion, but eventually we achieved it and he strode cheerfully up the road, very pleased with himself.

All was well until we reached the corner, at which point Abe realised That Road Sign was still lying in wait and he stopped – luckily in a wide part and where I could steer him off the tarmac so he could think in peace – and after a little dithering on his part, I picked one of the three available options (get off and lead him past it, start a fight about him walking past it or go home) and suggested to him that he’d done very well and home was perfectly acceptable. He accepted it and carried me back to the gate, where we repeated the earlier performance in reverse (excellent learning for us both!) and then he carried me to the normal dismounting spot and waited while I hopped off again. He richly deserved his handfuls of oats!

I’ve been concentrating on just being with George, hanging out with him, offering to scratch itches and generally just chilling, and he’s getting much more relaxed and chilled in return. I did have a session complaining about him while detangling Poppy’s mane the other day and she kept heaving huge sighs at me until I asked if she was bored, but apparently she was just showing me a useful calming signal. I tried heaving a huge sigh at George later when he was rassling me with his nose a bit and he looked startled, took a step back and moderated his nose politely, so it works!

The rabbits are still free-ranging around the yard. I haven’t seen Nightshade for days, but she was looking a bit old and tired then so perhaps she just went off quietly and died – a thing rabbits are quite good at – but Sage, Mistletoe, the surviving black one (now called Dubh) and the two young white ones, Medium and Titch, are still in evidence daily. Sage is of the opinion that Dubh is female, though Medium and Titch are still too young to be of interest.

The two young quail from the lounge went out to the barn today as 6 quail hatched yesterday and are now squeaking in the brooder cage. The remaining 6 eggs are still in the incubator and I’ll leave them until tomorrow night, but I’ve just found some silkie hatching eggs (something I’ve been looking for all year!) and will be collecting them over the weekend, so Sunday the incubator will be cleaned and prepped for the last batch of eggs of the year.

With my luck they’ll all be cockerels!

It’s been an extremely stressful, exhausting and upsetting couple of weeks since my last post, culminating in a huge upheaval.

To begin with, my mother’s mental health continued to go erratically and decidedly downhill. The local social care people came for a visit and said they thought it was time to talk about full-time residential care, and after another meeting for assessment they found a place in a nursing home 16 miles away. Two days after that Mum succeeded in slipping into the kitchen behind my back and managed to turn the cooker on, naturally choosing the ring under the frying pan to leave on full blast.

I tracked down the smoke before anything but the pan was on fire, but it’s left a lot of damage in the kitchen.

The work of cleaning up is slow and tedious, and I’ll have to replace the charred cupboard at some point.

That did at least put a stick of dynamite under the admission process for the nursing home, and the covid-19 testing team arrived two days later, the test results took 30 hours to get back and Mum was admitted into the nursing home on Friday 7th August.

I went home, collected lunch and the dogs and went to my local stone circle, 15 minutes’ walk downhill, to sleep for the afternoon. After nearly a fortnight of 22 hour days and catching a couple of hours as catnaps sitting in a chair in the lounge waiting for Mum’s next excursion, I badly need sleep! The dogs also thoroughly enjoyed their first walk for a year!

The animals are all fine, however exhausted I am. The goslings are now known as Attila and Tamurlane. They’re both big and sturdy, regard any sight of me as a reason to run up cheeping for food (with parents in hot pursuit) and have discovered bread crusts. The ducklings are all growing up well, too – Mother Duck’s brood are fully-feathered and as big as the other adults, although the young drakes aren’t as hefty as their elders just yet. Patchy’s eight are feathering up well and looking more like ducks with less ‘ling’ about it by the day.

The ferrets are happily getting on with things as usual, and Ivy’s four young meeps are chewing meat and looking bigger every time I see them – she has one male sandy meep and three females, two sandies and a silver mitt, so I’m calling them Ulysses, Helen, Penelope and another… I need to go read up the dramatis personae for the Illiad and the Odyssey because I can’t off-hand remember any more reasonably pronouncable Greek female characters! I’m not calling a ferret Iphigenia or Clytemnestra….

The hens are getting along steadily, as they do. I found one of the hybrids dead in the henhouse the other day but the rest all look healthy. The three youngest chicks are now known as Cuckoo, Goldilocks and Ginger, and are running about the yard with everyone else.

The bunnies have become free-range. One way or another they all escaped and refused to be caught again until I only had one left in a pen, at which point I gave up and liberated Mistletoe too. They’re apparently very happy living in the yard, cleaning up spilled oats from the poultry and grazing around the place cheerfully. It’s giving poor Wicket the Whippet a few terribly suspenseful experiences as she steps out of the house to find untouchable bunnies sitting up looking at her, but she’s coping!

The horses are doing fine. Abe has had his first in-hand walk up to the carpark in the woods and back last night – he behaved very calmly and ignored a couple of passing cars beautifully, then had an OMG!! moment looking at a road sign! I asked him to walk up to it and tapped it with my hand, asked him to touch it and then he relaxed and ignored it, so that was good. He wore his rhythm beads for the outing – the jingling is supposed to be soothing to the horse and lets wildlife know you’re coming, so startled pheasants don’t explode out of the hedge under your horse’s nose – certainly he was very soothed and nothing jumped out at us yesterday!

The quail are all fine – I have two youngsters in the lounge feathering up well and another batch in the incubator, probably the last for this summer as I don’t want to be worrying about putting them outside as the nights turn colder.

At the moment I’m still tidying, cleaning and trying to reorganise the house so I can get back to crafting and earning some money. I do have a few irons in the fire in that direction – not just proof-reading, which I’ve done now for over 20 years as Aberdeen Literary Services, but also I’m in the process of setting up farm-gate sales for eggs (as Cairnorchies Croft – Facebook page coming soon!), I’m trying to get my crafting work back up and running (Beansidhe Drumcraft) and also I’m engaged on a major new undertaking with my old friend and mentor, Elen Sentier, via our shamanic teaching work on a new site called the Deer Trods Tribe, where we’re offering tuition and experiential courses in shamanism.

Particularly when you’re waiting for something interesting to happen so you can blog about it!

A few things have now happened, however, so I shall duly blog.

Ivy has had her new litter and this time she has five! She seems entirely happy and cheerful with them and certainly managed very ably with Yarrow, so I just keep putting the food in and cleaning the muck out, trusting she knows precisely what she’s up to.

The older ones are all doing splendidly, with much bouncing and dooking, Angus is enjoying bouncing and dooking with them and Holly is putting up with the lot of them! I need to spread them out somewhat more, though – 7 ferrets in one cage is quite a lot of mucking out and I’m washing their floors twice a day to keep up with them! Ideally I’d build them a huge run big enough for multiple cages, toys, games areas and all 16 (now) ferrets to share amicably, but that hasn’t happened yet…

All the hen chicks are out in the shed and doing fine. The first three, Partridge, Thrush and Blackbird, are sticking together but exploring right out into the yard, learning all the places food turns up and so forth. The three little ones are also sticking as a posse but they’re not coming out of the barn more than a yard or so to sunbathe yet… they’ll get to it in a week or two more, undoubtedly. The four quail chicks from the last hatching are nearly feathered out and will be coming off heat this week, ready to move out to the barn next week, and I have another batch a couple of days off hatching in the incubator.

Lavender is still sitting firmly. Black Duck has recovered from her grief and is back to being one of the flock again. Patchy has her eight ducklings still and Mother Duck’s five are ducklings no more – definitely young ducks now, with hardly any fluff left and almost completely feathered up. Lucky Duck, the duckling who was shrink-wrapped, is still slightly smaller and slightly fluffier that the others, and she has a tidier cap of black on top of her head, so I can recognise her easily. One of the ducklings is much bigger than the rest, so I think we have one drake and four ducks – I think another week or so and I’ll be certain.

The geese are still magnificent parents. The goslings are big and sturdy, brave enough now to tweak the tails of even adult drakes, and they’ve developed the habit of seeing me and running up for food. This would be charming if their parents didn’t come running after them hissing the goose equivalent of ‘get away from our babies you filthy pervert!’.

Abe has had his flu jab and is fine. George picked up his feet for me every day for a week and let me pick them all out – and then, yesterday, decided the game was boring and bit me very hard as I was just lifting his near hind. I have bruising the covers pretty much the whole of the lower right quarter of my back. He didn’t get away with it, however – when I’d stopped swearing I put his head collar on, tied him up fairly short and went round all four hooves thoroughly. I did let him off today, though – I’ve stiffened up overnight and it just wasn’t worth the pain.

Tonight has been a rabbit night. I spent ages carefully cable-tying weldmesh inside one of the grazing pens and put the two little black bunnies in it. All seemed fine, so I put the three little white bunnies in as well. Mistletoe, their mother, is out in the big run with Sage, and Nightshade is back in a hutch as she was quite vastly spherical and due to pop. This morning the little black bunnies had tunnelled out and led a small white one astray with them. They’ll just have to take their chances for a day or two – I’m not in a fit state for corralling bunnies just now.

Nightshade, meanwhile, had her offspring this afternoon (an unusual time for a rabbit to give birth). She didn’t build a nest first, which is unlike her; she’s normally a very organised parent and puts a good nest together, well lined with fur, in plenty of time. This time there were newborns all over and she hadn’t even cleaned them up, so I frantically peeled amniotic sacs off noses, checked placentas and untwined umbilical cords from around necks. One kit had suffocated in the sax before I got to them, but the other eleven (yes – 11!!) are fine and healthy. I brought them in and popped them under an electric hen for a while (such useful gadgets!) before building them a nest in a cardboard box, but they’re back out with Nightshade now. She was nest-building madly when I took them out and we had a bit of a Benny Hill episode where she was grabbing mouthfuls of straw out of the nest to build another nest, which meant the kits complained about the draft, so she jumped in the nestbox on top of them and got another round of complains (fairly sure one of the squeaks involved ‘hob nailed hoofs!’) but I picked her up at that point, put her down on the other side of the hutch, buttressed the nestbox into a corner with handfuls of straw and left her sitting on top of her kits looking slightly bewildered. She’s never had such a big litter before – maybe that fried her brain cell. I think she’ll be ok now, anyway.

I’ll check again before bed. As long as the kits are warm they’ll be ok through the night.

Oh yes…. Dancer is now 2 years old!

Sometimes life gets in the way of blogging.

We had a very bizarre blip in my mother’s mental stability last week; the Adult Mental Health team wanted to increase her dosage of a drug called memantine from the very low introductory dose of 5mg up to 20mg, which is apparently the normal therapeutic dose. As the first step in getting from one to the other, they asked me to double the daily dose, which I duly did – with spectacular results.

It was one of the most unpleasant 24 hours I’ve known, involving stopping my mother burning the house down twice, hauling her back from multiple attempts to walk to the shops (3.5 miles away!) at eleven o’clock at night, outright refusal to go to bed and when I did finally persuade her to go to bed, she was up again ten minutes later and we had to do it again…. and again…. and again. Her various other medications – for blood pressure and heart failure – were rejected flatly and when I insisted she took them, she tried to hide them in her breakfast cereal – then threw that bowlful away and ate four more bowlfuls, one after another.

That was the end of the memantine. My GP, whom I called the following morning, of course, confirmed I was right to stop giving it altogether and after another 24 hours the situation had returned to normal.

It’s taken me a long time to catch up on the lost sleep, since I rarely get more than 6 hours anyway and I’m by nature one of those who likes a nice uninterrupted 8 hours.

In the meantime, the various animal dramas have continued.

The geese are exemplary parents and the goslings are doing very well, both growing strongly.

Mother Duck’s 5 goslings are feathering out nicely now, getting big and sturdy. Patchy lost another duckling in some viciously cold torrential rain we experienced one night, but the remaining eight are now liberated to run around the yard again, too big for the predators now. Black Duck, alas, lost all her ducklings one way and another, and after moping for a few days, seems now to be adjusting. Lavender Girl is still sitting tight in the workshop, right behind the door – she pops out for a bath and a quick gulp of food every couple of days, then goes straight back again.

The ferret meeps are meeps no longer – they’re active, playful, sturdy young ferrets. Ivy is back in a nursery run ready for her next litter, looking very healthy and active but with a distinct bulge in the middle. Holly, slim from end to end, is doing sole-parent duty for Yarrow as well as her own four, but Uncle Angus is now sharing that cage with the family. Here’s Angus trying to sleep while Yarrow and one of the sandies bounced on his hammock!

Abe has been working on half-pass again – he can do it superbly going from left to right, but refuses to even try going from right to left. I wonder if perhaps it’s uncomfortable for him with his sarcoids, so I’ve decided to give him time off to concentrate on his health. George’s new roller has arrived and fits, so I’ll work with him more instead. Horses don’t forget anything (rather like elephants!) and Abe won’t come to any harm taking a few weeks off in his education.

I’ll finish with the ferrets – this was their first trip into the house yesterday, where they spent a few hours in the lounge getting a lot of playing and handling from me, along with some gentle but firm nip-training when they experimentally chew on my fingers!

I managed to fit in a quick ride with Abe yesterday evening, after he’d had his dinner (I know, exercise after meals is bad but… it’s only a small feed and it was only a ten-minute walk around the yard, so he certainly exercises more strenuously going out with the Herd and running round the field!)

He was better at the block (last time he was definitely seeing what he could get away with!) and accepted me putting my foot in the stirrup without all the fidgeting we had last time, though he did put his head up and give me a decidedly old-fashioned look each time! I didn’t use the stirrups to get on, though – he’s not quite ready for that yet – so I just jumped aboard in the usual manner.

He walked excellently, more fluid and confident, and we went up to the road gate, through the gate into the garden bit (badly overgrown with docks and thistles just now!) and then turned a circle and came out again, walked down the yard, round the bit by the house and off into the paddock from the other end, right up to the top and out through the gate again! We did some halt at the gate, which he disapproved of – some head-tossing and pawing of the ground – and then walked down to the mounting block and back up again. We arrived at the top as a car came past, so we stood right up against the gate to watch it pass and he didn’t twitch a muscle, so that was good!

After that we went back to the bottom and I asked him to step onto the pallet there, which he did without hesitation and stood with his front end up for a good thirty seconds before reversing off again. We did a little circle and came up to the pallet again, and this time he walked right up, over and off the other side calmly and confidently – not just very hollow under the hooves but also of course my weight was shifting as I leaned forward on the up and back on the down, so he’s getting used to that sensation too.

We went back to the road gate again via the piece of vinyl flooring that lies in ambush for passing horses (according to Dancer!) and he walked over it without hesitation.

I noticed that he’s starting to respond to my seat before I can put leg or hand aids into action on corners – he’s picking up on me turning my head to look where I want to go, so he’s feeling my balance shift even that tiny amount!

His only complaints were that he didn’t want to halt and stand still, and we stopped too soon – I’ll work on extending his patience standing still, but in a young horse it’s not surprising if he’s a bit impatient and I’d much rather he wanted to carry on than was glad to stop, so no complaints! He’s showing all the signs of making a very sensitive, willing riding partner, which is marvellous. I think the next major step forward in his education will be for us to start taking road walks together in-hand, so he can get used to traffic and the forest paths with me right by his head for reassurance. Once he’s cool with that, we’ll start riding the same routes, and then, when we have the space and good footing, I’ll ask him to move up from walk to trot, and when we have walk to trot, trotting and trot to walk securely mastered, then we move on to canter.

One step at a time!

This morning we have quail chicks – three so far and another egg pipping vigorously. Fingers crossed the remaining eight have at least a few live chicks in them, but there’s nothing squeaking or rocking that I’ve noticed amongst them… yet.

I need to do some research – I noticed Hannibal this morning was doing a very ponderous slow-mo version of a gull’s worm-drum dance and I’m wondering what he’s up to! He and Lucy are still hovering within a foot of their two lively-looking offspring and they’ve spent most of the day sunbathing in the grass rather than lurking in the barn.

Hannibal and Lucy are taking the goslings out for short, unhurried walks around the yard with breaks between excursions – all very sensible!

I’ve just ordered George’s new roller – in XXL/draft horse size – from the Big Horse Shop, a company specialising in draft horse stuff. I measured him with a length of string and he’s going to need a 7 foot 4 inch rug as well as being 92 inches in circumference at the girth! That means his beautiful 30-inch sheepskin girth from last year won’t fit him any more than the full size roller (that also fitted last year!) does, so I’ll have to get him a much longer girth when the time comes for saddles!

I’ve been considering getting him a Total Contact Saddle – it looks a bit odd to an eye accustomed to a more traditional saddle but those who have them seem to swear by them and certainly George, with his broad, relatively flat back and low withers, won’t need as much thick padding as Abe wants on his narrow, high-withered back. The Lamfelle Iberica pad I use for Abe seems to suit him well – and would be fine on George, too – but if I decide to find someone to ride Abe when I ride George, so I could take both of them out at the same time for a hack, then I’d need two saddles or saddle pads, so I’m looking at the various options and considering what might suit the Big Ginger Job in due course.

This is the TCS from their website:

Basically it’s just a broad leather strap to attach stirrups safely, used over a thick numnah to avoid any pressure or rubbing on the horse’s back.

I was absolutely delighted last night to spot a tiny beak and a dark grey head amongst Lucy’s feathers! This morning I’ve glimpsed two goslings, but she’s still sitting tight and Hannibal is hovering very close at hand, so I haven’t been able to take and photos or tell for sure how many there are.

I’m thrilled for the geese, after last year’s disaster when their one egg broke just a couple of days before the gosling was viable; they both grieved somewhat after that and I hope they get a lot of joy and fulfilment from raising their goslings this year!

It’s been a bit of a struggle over the past few days – rats are notoriously fond of killing small ducklings, and while Mother Duck’s five seem big enough now to be safe from most predators (I also have magpies, rooks, crows, buzzards, sparrowhawk and peregrine around from time to time!) both Patchy and Black Duck have lost ducklings.

Patchy is now down to 9 ducklings (and it was nearly 8 today – one got chilled in the rain. Luckily I spotted it and whisked it inside to sit under an electric brooder until it was dry and warm again – at which point it jumped out of the box and was scampering around the floor, cheeping madly). Black Duck has lost 4, all in the space of an hour yesterday afternoon!

I’ve done some rearranging of the ferrets to free up the big runs that the jills had as their nursery quarters, stapled plastic feed sacks all over one end to provide weather protection and then managed to catch and incarcerate both broods with their respective mothers. They are now, I think, safe from predation – if not from the weather!

The young ferrets have spent the day learning about climbing ladders and hopping into hammocks. Like every ferret I’ve ever met, they’re keen on hammocks – just how a ground-living burrow-hunting species developed a fondness for rocking gently in aerial nests leaves me baffled! I still need to clean and furbish up one more cage and then I’ll have the next lot of nursery quarters ready for Ivy for three weeks’ time, when she needs it.

Thrush, Blackbird and Partridge are now out of their pen in the small dairy shed and exploring the barn. They sleep on top of the quail with Pompom and Mahogany, so when the current three chicks in the lounge are big enough to go outside that pen will be available again.

As you can see, they look like chickens now!